64 The Language of Fashion
the absolute individual and the total mass of society: Fashion has in
some way been given the job of making more subtle and of neutralizing
dandyism; modern democratic society has made fashion into a sort
of cross-subsidizing organism, destined to establish an automatic
equilibrium between the demand for singularity and the right for all to
have it. There is clearly a contradiction in terms here: society has made
fashion viable only by subjecting vestimentary innovation to a strictly
regular duration, slow enough for one to be able to be subject to it, but
fast enough to initiate buying rhythms and to establish a distinction of
fortunes between men.
It seems that, for women’s clothing, the high number of elements
(we might say units) of which fashion is made up still allows for a
rich set of possible combinations and consequently for an authentic
individuation of an outfit. But we have seen, without talking about the
psychological traits (probably narcissistic and homosexual) which have
made dandyism into an essentially masculine phenomenon, that dandy
clothing was possible only during this historically ephemeral period
when clothing was uniform in its type and variable in its details. Though
slower and less radical than women’s fashion, men’s does none the less
exhaust the variation in details, yet without, for many years, touching any
aspect of the fundamental type of clothing: so Fashion, then, deprives
dandyism of both its limits and its main source of inspiration—it really is
Fashion that has killed dandyism.
Note
1 Published in United States Lines Paris Review, special number on
Dandyism, July 1962; Oeuvres complètes vol. 1, 963–6.